Value for Investment: An Evaluative System for Government, Public Services, and Social Investment

This book presents Value for Investment (VfI), a practical evaluative system for anyone who has to decide whether a policy, program, or other intervention is a good use of resources. This reframes value for money as a question about how well resources are used, not just a number on a spreadsheet, and shows how to answer that question in ways that are rigorous, credible, and useful.Building on work in evaluation and economics, VfI combines four core principles - interdisciplinarity, mixed methods, explicit evaluative reasoning, and participation - into an eight-step process that can be applied from early options appraisal through implementation, adaptation, and review. Drawing on real world applications across governments, NGOs, international development, and Indigenous and cross-cultural contexts, the book shows how VfI can be used for single programs, portfolios, and whole of organisation frameworks, and how to keep those frameworks flexible and living as evidence and priorities change.Written for practitioners, funders and community leaders, this is an essential resource for readers who want to learn how to define value propositions and theories of value creation, co-create rubrics with stakeholders, integrate economic analyses such as cost-benefit analysis without letting them dominate, and bring numbers, stories, and diverse perspectives together into transparent judgements about value for money in context.

About the Author

Julian King is a New Zealand-based public policy consultant who specialises in evaluation and Value for Investment (VfI). He is Director of Julian King & Associates, a member of the Kinnect Group, an Associate of Oxford Policy Management, and an Honorary Fellow at the University of Melbourne.